Much like with Bernie Sanders and his "trouble with Black voters", those who are desperate to tear down Elizabeth Warren latched onto something that was "not especially popular", exaggerated it into "super UNpopular", and have been obsessively trying to spin it into bring her "major (perhaps fatal?) weakness".

Right. Another way of saying "it won't be broken for at least 10 years" would be "it could be broken in as soon as 10 years!" -- which, for the purposes of at least some organizations, is a "ZOMG THE SKY IS FALLING WE'RE SCREWED AAAAAAAH!!1!" scenario.

Exactly, you'd have to do something like that for the results to be meaningful. Data from people playing at home on their own machines will have all kinds of bias.

By the way -- again, I don't remember what company this was in reference to, I have no idea how it may relate to CloudFlare's statements, and I might just be imagining the whole thing, but -- I think the context was that some company had been including something like "Number of National Security Letters Received: 0" in their quarterly reports, or some such official documents, and then one day someone noticed they'd stopped doing so, and they wouldn't comment on it.

"Contempt of what?" -- Exactly, and that's the brilliance of it! At the time you write it, you've never received any such order. You're aware that such things exist, though you have no specific knowledge as to whether you will ever receive one. Still, they represent a risk to your ability to provide the service your customers rely on; all available information regarding them is therefore clearly important to your shareholders. Seems you're almost *obligated* to include that in your SEC filings, right? At least, for as long as you're at liberty to do so...

At the time you write it, you have never received any such order, nor do you have any specific knowledge that any such order will ever exist.

No court has ever ordered me not to tell you that I'm wearing pants right now. It's possible that one could do so in the future. Must I refrain from talking about my pants-wearing status now, for fear of some such future order?

"conspiring to violate a court order" -- conspiring with your own future self?

"act of contempt" -- contempt of a time-traveling order that binds you retroactively on actions taken before it was written?

Yes, it has that effect, but the "self-destruct" idea is to set it up so there's no other choice. I'm not sure what company I first heard this about, or how it relates to these Transparency Reports, but the way I remember it, the statement was included in official documents filed with the SEC. (Something like "Number of Disclosures: 0" in a state-of-the-company section.) Falsifying information in one of those would be unthinkable(!), so there'd be no choice but to stop including that line. Poof!

This is an argument for the climate change situation being difficult -- more so than many of us realize, in terms of how widespread the potential economic pain is -- but it's not an argument against it being true.

What are you talking about? What laws of physics say an object, artificial or otherwise, can't travel from one solar system to another? Heck, whatever Oumuamua is, it's an existence proof to the contrary.

Should I clarify that when we talk about the spaceship hypothesis, we're not saying we think it's an *operational* spaceship full of living aliens? A multimillion-year-old, and (duh) long-dead, spaceprobe would fit the bill too.

Is there some law of physics I'm not aware of that says it's impossible that, millions of years from now, our Pioneer 11 (for example) might drift close enough to some other star to make a similar hyperbolic swing around it and cause the aliens living there to have this same argument?

(Of course I'm not saying it's likely, or that there's any scientific evidence for it, but why should it be *impossible*?)

Yeah, the right balance seems to be: allow editing, but keep edit history; display only latest version, but with an "(edited at )" label that links to the history; no hotlinking to old versions, but they're available.

"the four-word example popularized by online comic XKCD, 'correcthorsebatterystaple'."

In fact, use that exact passphrase. It's the best one.

I was expecting this thread to be a whole bunch of descriptions of things exactly as they are, followed by "Oh, wait...".

But, see, if you cherry-pick the cases of good behavior among people on your side, and equally cherry-pick the cases of bad behavior on the other side, you can turn it into "proof" of your side's moral superiority!

"CIA Exposed a Highly Sensitive Communications System on the Public Internet, Where it Could be Compromised by Iranians Simply Using Google Search"

Yours. The one who glibly ignores all context and pretends the two sides are equivalent. That's the one who's dealing in "alternative facts". (Also, the one who can't use apostrophes -- that's usually a good clue.)